Epistemic Norms & Informal Fallacies

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Abstractions about reasoning, belief, and argumentative failure, including epistemic norms and commitments such as Clifford's principle and epistemic commitment, informal fallacies and biases like appeal to the stone and the rhyme-as-reason effect, and classic epistemological puzzles such as Hume's fork and Moore's paradox.

16 abstractions in this family — domain-specific abstractions that sit near one another in structural-signature space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Anti-patriotism — A principled opposition to patriotic attachment or compulsory national loyalty, often grounded in cosmopolitan, internationalist, anti-militarist, or anti-authoritarian commitments.
• Appeal to the Stone — An informal fallacy that rejects a claim as absurd or false while supplying no reason that engages the claim.
• Causal adequacy principle — The Cartesian rule that a total efficient cause must possess at least as much metaphysical reality as its effect, formally in the same mode or eminently in a higher one.
• Clifford's Principle — An ethics-of-belief norm holding that accepting or retaining a belief without sufficient evidence is morally wrong, together with a duty not to disregard relevant counterevidence.
• Constructive Logic — A family of proof systems in which establishing a claim requires the construction appropriate to its logical form, rather than unrestricted reliance on classical excluded middle or double-negation elimination.
• Emotive Conjugation — Emotive conjugation grades descriptions of comparable conduct from flattering self-language to disparaging other-language across person-positioned clauses.
• Epistemic commitment — A defeasible responsibility to uphold a truth-apt proposition with reasons, accept its inferential consequences, and revise or withdraw it under appropriate counterevidence.
• Gamer's Dilemma — A virtual-ethics consistency problem asking what principle justifies divergent judgments about simulated acts when neither directly harms a real depicted victim.
• Hitchens's Razor — A burden-of-support rule allowing an assertion offered without evidence to be withheld or dismissed without a contrary evidential case, while not thereby proving it false.
• Hume's Fork — Hume's division between necessary relations of ideas known through thought and contingent matters of fact warranted through experience.
• I'm Entitled to My Opinion — Using one's right to hold a view as a substitute for reasons that the view is true or justified.
• Moore's paradox — The peculiar absurdity of sincerely asserting ‘p, but I do not believe p’ or ‘p, but I believe not-p’ in the first person and present tense, even though either conjunction can be true and is not logically contradictory.
• Null Move — Passing or simulating a skipped turn without an ordinary board or resource action, while turn control changes; useful in game analysis or reduced-depth search but unsafe as a pruning premise in zugzwang.
• Rhyme-as-Reason Effect — A judgment bias in which a statement is rated as more truthful or accurate when its wording rhymes, even when a closely matched nonrhyming version expresses the same proposition.
• Self-Righteousness — An attitude of presumed moral superiority in which a person treats their own beliefs, conduct, or affiliation as evidence of greater virtue and judges others from that elevated position.
• Trivial Objections — The fallacy of treating minor objections as sufficient to defeat a larger claim they leave substantially untouched.